Scottish writer Muriel Spark was BOTD in 1918. Born and raised in Edinburgh, she worked as a teacher and secretary before marrying Sidney Spark, a man 13 years her senior, moving with him to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). After the collapse of their marriage, she placed their infant son in boarding school and moved to London, working for British Intelligence until the end of World War Two. Her son returned to Britain to be raised by relatives, while Spark embarked on a literary career. Her breakthrough came in 1951 when she won the Observer Short Story Competition, followed by her debut novel The Comforters, dramatising her conversion to Catholicism. Her best-known novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, portrayed an eccentric, charismatic schoolteacher with Fascist leanings who is destroyed by one of her former students. A critical and commercial success, it was adapted as a stage play and a 1969 film starring Maggie Smith, who won an Oscar for the role. Spark continued producing novels and short stories at a prolific rate, including Memento Mori, The Girls of Slender Means, The Driver’s Seat (filmed in 1974 and starring Elizabeth Taylor) and Loitering with Intent. Her work was notable for crisp, satirical prose, a jaundiced view of gender relations and macabre storylines featuring violent deaths. Spark moved to Rome in 1968 where she met the artist Penelope Jardine. They lived together for the rest of Spark’s life, settling in rural Tuscany and persistently denying rumours of a lesbian relationship. Spark died in 2006 aged 88, leaving her estate to Jardine and pointedly disinheriting her son.